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The Primitive Mind in every animal—humans included—has been optimized to near perfection at getting animals to survive long enough to pass their precious genes along to new containers.

Many of the human world’s mysteries become a lot less mysterious when we put on our x-ray goggles. With x-ray vision, we can see the inner psychology that lies behind the scenes of every human What.

Where we are on this y-axis is a result of the state of our internal tug-of-war, so the first question we need to ask is: how do the two minds think?

How the Two Minds Think

For the rest of this series, we’re going to apply one particular second dimension to everything we discuss: the Psych Spectrum.

Without these goggles, we’d look at a human and just see what a human looks like in one dimension. That’s the What of a human, and it includes all of the aspects of their behavior, their beliefs, and their personality.

The tug-of-war isn’t binary—it’s a spectrum. Let’s call it the Psych Spectrum.

At the very top of the stack are the values we hold sacred, and as we move down the stack, we place less and less importance on each value. Whenever two values conflict with one another, the lower one will be the one to compromise, while the higher one will stand firm.

Looking at everything in one dimension just shows us what’s on the surface of all these parts of reality. But when we lift the covers off the What of life and look at what lies beneath, we’re reminded that there’s a second dimension to everything as well.

The Battle Over Our Beliefs